As part of a substantial rearrangement of our house, my wife and I have been going through our books and forcing ourselves to get rid of those we’re pretty sure we’ll never read or never read again. On Monday I found a little book that I probably bought at a library sale and have never read: My Way of Life: A Pocket Edition of St. Thomas / The Summa Simplified for Everyone, by Walter Farrell, O.P., S.T.M., and Martin J. Healy, S.T.D., published in 1952. It’s literally a little book, about three by four inches and less than an inch thick, but containing over 600 pages of fairly small print. I probably bought it because it was sort of quaint, and not because I really wanted to read a simplified version of St. Thomas. (I used to think I might read the Summa when and if I retire, but the fact is that I probably won’t.)

So, standing in the middle of a room full of boxes and books, looking at this one, I thought “This is probably one I can do without.” But I opened it up and read the first paragraph:

The road that stretches before the feet of a man is a challenge to his heart long before it test the strength of his legs. Our destiny is to run to the edge of the world and beyond, off into the darkness: sure for all our blindness, secure for all our helplessness, strong for all our weakness, gaily in love for all the pressure on our hearts.

I’m keeping it for that paragraph, even if I never read another word of it.